A heuristic reactive scheduling strategy for recovering from refinery supply chain disruptions

Supply chain management is one key area that has gathered much interest from both the academic and business communities. Today’s many uncertainties require that supply chains be nimble and resilient in reacting to disruptions for sustainable operations. We look at a refinery supply chain and present a strategy for recovering from disruptions by heuristic rescheduling. This is important as refinery scheduling for a real world industrial size problem typically requires a significantly large amount of time to generate an optimal schedule. Our method takes much less time to generate near optimal schedule than total rescheduling in handling disruptions. We illustrate our method using a refinery with 3 CDUs, 6 crudes, 8 tanks, 2 crude categories, one 3-parcel VLCC, and three single-parcel vessels arriving in a 120 h horizon and two disruptions: tank unavailability and a vessel delay.